"They'll vote against it on principle,you know,"he added."We get a little something from the Maple Avenue residents."I've forgotten what the Riverside Franchise cost.The sum was paid in a lump sum to Mr.Bitter as his "fee,"--so,to their chagrin,a grand jury discovered in later years,when they were barking around Mr.Jason's hole with an eager district attorney snapping his whip over them.I remember the cartoon.The municipal geese were gone,but it was impossible to prove that this particular fox had used his enlightened reason in their procurement.Mr.Bitter was a legally authorized fox,and could take fees.How Mr.Jason was to be rewarded by the land company's left-hand,unknown,to the land company's right hand,became a problem worthy of a genius.The genius was found,but modesty forbids me to mention his name,and the problem was solved,to wit:the land company bought a piece of downtown property from--Mr.Ryerson,who was Mr.Grierson's real estate man and the agent for the land company,for a consideration of thirty thousand dollars.An unconfirmed rumour had it that Mr.Ryerson turned over the thirty thousand to Mr.Jason.Then the Riverside Company issued a secret deed of the same property back to Mr.Ryerson,and this deed was not recorded until some years later.
Such are the elaborate transactions progress and prosperity demand.
Nature is the great teacher,and we know that her ways are at times complicated and clumsy.Likewise,under the "natural"laws of economics,new enterprises are not born without travail,without the aid of legal physicians well versed in financial obstetrics.One hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand,let us say,for the right to build tracks on Maplewood Avenue,and we sold nearly two million dollars worth of the securities back to the public whose aldermen had sold us the franchise.
Is there a man so dead as not to feel a thrill at this achievement?And let no one who declares that literary talent and imagination are nonexistent in America pronounce final judgment until he reads that prospectus,in which was combined the best of realism and symbolism,for the labours of Alonzo Cheyne were not to be wasted,after all.Mr.
Dickinson,who was a director in the Maplewood line,got a handsome underwriting percentage,and Mr.Berringer,also a director,on the bonds and preferred stock he sold.Mr.Paret,who entered both companies on the ground floor,likewise got fees.Everybody was satisfied except the trouble makers,who were ignored.In short,the episode of the Riverside Franchise is a triumphant proof of the contention that business men are the best fitted to conduct the politics of their country.
We had learned to pursue our happiness in packs,we knew that the Happy Hunting-Grounds are here and now,while the Reverend Carey Heddon continued to assure the maimed,the halt and the blind that their kingdom was not of this world,that their time was coming later.Could there have been a more idyl arrangement!Everybody should have been satisfied,but everybody was not.Otherwise these pages would never have been written.
XVIII.
As the name of our city grew to be more and more a byword for sudden and fabulous wealth,not only were the Huns and the Slavs,the Czechs and the Greeks drawn to us,but it became the fashion for distinguished Englishmen and Frenchmen and sometimes Germans and Italians to pay us a visit when they made the grand tour of America.They had been told that they must not miss us;scarcely a week went by in our community--so it was said--in which a full-fledged millionaire was not turned out.Our visitors did not always remain a week,--since their rapid journeyings from the Atlantic to the Pacific,from Canada to the Gulf rarely occupied more than four,--but in the books embodying their mature comments on the manners,customs and crudities of American civilization no less than a chapter was usually devoted to us;and most of the adjectives in their various languages were exhausted in the attempt to prove how symptomatic we were of the ambitions and ideals of the Republic.The fact that many of these gentlemen--literary and otherwise--returned to their own shores better fed and with larger balances in the banks than when they departed is neither here nor there.Egyptians are proverbially created to be spoiled.
The wiser and more fortunate of these travellers and students of life brought letters to Mr.and Mrs.Hambleton Durrett.That household was symptomatic--if they liked--of the new order of things;and it was rare indeed when both members of it were at home to entertain them.If Mr.
Durrett were in the city,and they did not happen to be Britons with sporting proclivities,they simply were not entertained:when Mrs.
Durrett received them dinners were given in their honour on the Durrett gold plate,and they spent cosey and delightful hours conversing with her in the little salon overlooking the garden,to return to their hotels and jot down paragraphs on the superiority of the American women over the men.These particular foreigners did not lay eyes on Mr.Durrett,who was in Florida or in the East playing polo or engaged in some other pursuit.One result of the lavishness and luxury that amazed them they wrote--had been to raise the standard of culture of the women,who were our leisure class.But the travellers did not remain long enough to arrive at any conclusions of value on the effect of luxury and lavishness on the sacred institution of marriage.
If Mr.Nathaniel Durrett could have returned to his native city after fifteen years or so in the grave,not the least of the phenomena to startle him would have been that which was taking place in his own house.
